Companies identify best practices, particularly those of market leaders, and try to implement them. Such benchmarking has a role to play in business, but I’m not exactly a fan of the process. It may allow enterprises to catch up with competitors, but it won’t turn them into market leaders. Organizations become winners by spotting big opportunities and inventing next practices—as I’ve pointed out to CEOs for over two decades now.
Companies become winners by spotting big opportunities and inventing next practices.
Next practices are all about innovation: imagining what the future will look like; identifying the mega-opportunities that will arise; and building capabilities to capitalize on them. Apple’s Steve Jobs and Tata Motors’ Ratan Tata do just that.
Most executives believe it’s tough to identify breakthrough opportunities. However, several are pretty obvious; Peter Drucker once said that the best opportunities are “visible, but not seen.” I help executives unearth opportunities by focusing them on big problems that their companies will benefit from by tackling. They must ask six questions:
- Is the problem widely recognized?
- Does it affect other industries?
- Are radical innovations needed to tackle the problem?
- Can tackling it change the industry’s economics?
- Will addressing this issue give us a fresh source of competitive advantage?
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Why Best Practices Get You Only So Far - C.K. Prahalad
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